Caught in the Act | OPEN Magazine

Caught in the Act | OPEN Magazine

Caught in the Act

A dispassionate history of sex and the powerful mythologies that have surrounded it down the ages

5

BY Kalpish Ratna EMAIL AUTHOR(S)

TAGGED UNDER | mythology | sex | history

SEX

THAT PENETRATING GAZE Freud, quite the high priest of human sexuality, had vehemently dissed the clitoris. Any woman who had a clitoral orgasm was, for him, nuts

Ten years ago, a friend in publishing told me every book he published was about sex. It had to be, or it wouldn’t sell. That year, one of his authors had won the Bad Sex Award so I could allow him literary fiction, but what about the rest?

Travel writing, for instance—

That too, he said.

Everything was about doing it.

Travel was where, history when, crime why, psychology why not, romance whether, biography with whom, health just in case, and as for how, he had that covered between sci-fi and self-help.

Cookbooks? I challenged.

He sniggered. Had I seen a cookbook lately? Chemists ordered cookbooks by the tonne when they ran out of Viagra.

He, of course, was talking about what makes a book sell.

Or was he?

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I was reminded of this conversation last week when reading about a brain imaged in flagrante delicto. The very thought is anhedonic, but apparently people have cheerily volunteered to orgasm inside an MRI machine. Surely such service in the name of science would have been, in an earlier age, decently obscured in anonymity?

Think again. In 1677 Anton Leuwenhock told the world about the cute ‘animalcules’ he saw when he put a drop of his ejaculate under his new invention, the microscope—albeit a little nervously, worried ‘that the world, which is coarse and vicious enough, might use the knowledge of nature for its own ruin and increasingly debauch itself in depravity.’ He was also careful to clarify he was not guilty of the horrific sin of self-pollution: the semen under scrutiny was merely the dregs of legitimate intercourse.

In a famous medical goof-up, the eighteenth century British surgeon John Hunter allegedly inoculated his penis with gonorrheal discharge from a patient who also had syphilis, and then went on to suffer all the ravages of syphilis in public gaze. That myth is now busted. Hunter’s own (May 1767) account of the inoculation doesn’t say who was so inoculated. John Hunter’s life was bold and aggressively brilliant. His death (16 October 1793) was in character: he slumped dead after a furious argument at a board meeting. His body was autopsied by his brother-in-law Everard Home, and the findings carefully documented. There were no signs of syphilis. John Hunter had died, like so many of his present day colleagues, of ischaemic heart disease.

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